


dream logic

by mikkary



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Blink And You Miss It Slash, Character Study, Death, Dreams, Gen, Mentions of Suicide, Season 5 Spoilers, Suicidal Thoughts, suicide description
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:08:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27251698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mikkary/pseuds/mikkary
Summary: Oliver Banks is not surprised when the Archivist appears in his dreams. He gave a statement, after all. It's almost expected.What is surprising is how long the Archivist stays.
Relationships: Oliver Banks & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Oliver Banks/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 5
Kudos: 52





	dream logic

**Author's Note:**

> Please note this fic contains mentions of suicide, suicidal thoughts, and death, along with a helping of End-typical nihilism (that should be a new tag for this fandom). Also the general violations of privacy that come along with affiliation to the Ceaseless Watcher, and spoilers for TMA episode 168.
> 
> Anyway, it's time for Loving Oliver Banks hours. Please join me.

“Well, this is awkward,” Oliver Banks says to the view of London spread out before him. He’s high above the city again, drifting over Canary Wharf, his toes almost but not quite touching the sloped roof. The bright red beacon light flares on and off behind him, pulsing. But it isn’t a light anymore. It’s an eye.

Really, it’s an _Eye_. And Oliver Banks can feel the weight of its regard like a physical pressure on his shoulders.

“Hello, Jon,” he says without turning around. “Or should I call you ‘Archivist’?” A silent pause. “No, that’s too dramatic. Like calling myself ‘Reaper.’ We both know what we are now. No need to say it. ‘Jon’ and ‘Oliver’ work fine.”

There is no response. He knows with the certainty of dreams that Jon is sittingstanding behind him, eyesEye open, watchinglistening. He doesn’t need to look. He isn’t meant to be the Watcher, in this dream. He’s the Watched.

Subject. Object.

“Has anyone told you what an odd feeling this is? Not to be alone in your dreams? Or maybe you know. Does it watch you, too?”

Subject, object, _verb_. He moves, drifting away and down over this London, _his_ London, shrouded in reddish dark and filled with slowly moving, pulsing tendrils of Death. The pressure of being Watched remains consistent in its intensity until it doesn’t, and the heaviness evaporates with a _pop_.

And once again, Oliver Banks is alone at the End.

*

It comes back, of course. _Jon_ comes back, Oliver Banks supposes he should say instead. At this point, Jon and the Watcher are indistinguishable. As relatively friendly-feeling as he is towards Jon the man, he can’t say that he likes the Presence at his shoulder. He’s gotten used to the lonely solitude of his dreams. The solipsism of them.

The quiet.

Not that it isn’t quiet, now. Jon never makes a sound. Oliver Banks doesn’t know if he can. But there’s a buzzing of nerves at the base of his neck that is at odds with the ethereal unreality of his presence, and it’s jarring. Not quite _fearful_ , but… well. Maybe this is what the Beholder wants.

“I suppose I should have known this would happen,” he says aloud, his voice muffled in the quiet of his solitary dreamscape. “Especially after I gave a statement to you directly. I don’t mind, but… Before now, I barely realized I dreamed. It feels so much like everyday life.”

A pause. A blank, Watchful silence.

“Life,” Oliver Banks repeats and chuckles mirthlessly. “Yes. Hilarious, I know.”

They drift together in silence until they are no longer a _they_ , just a _he_ , and Oliver Banks lets out a not-breath of relief.

*

The Watcher in his dreams makes him chatty. Oliver Banks supposes that’s rather the point; after all, what is a statement if not an internal monologue of terror given words and voice and breath? When it’s there, he finds himself speaking aloud more often than not, giving voice to his nighttime reminiscing.

“Did you know, Point Nemo is also one of the most lifeless places on earth? It’s too far from any shore, and the currents – there’s no nutrients falling to the seafloor. Just… silence. Darkness. Crushing depths. And me.”

He studies London spread out before him. Even the lifeless dream echo of the space is lit with sickly red, and he knows where each of the specters are located within it, the burned out afterimages of the city’s dead.

“I miss it, sometimes.”

The Watcher is silent.

“But I suppose that’s what will happen in the End, everywhere. Finally, some peace and quiet.” He allows himself a quiet, mirthless chuckle. “I think I’ve forgotten how to be afraid of that. It just… seems nice. Maybe I’ll go back – to the ocean, I mean. Could take you with me.” There’s a spike in interest, in Attention, that Oliver Banks feels like a cool trickle of sweat down the back of his neck. “Not _physically_ , I mean,” he amends quickly. “But if I dreamed down there in the depths…”

The pressure on the back of his neck is gone. Oliver Banks is alone in his dream once more. He finishes the sentence anyway: “I imagine you’d be along eventually.”

*

He is not quite standing on the Waterloo Bridge, looking at the tendrils that snake off the road and onto the surface of the Thames. He’d spent some nights here awake, back when he was – _younger_ seems the wrong word for it now. Back when he was more attached. Looking for sad eyed people who resembled him, who he’d been once, whose fates twined around their wrists and ankles like chains dragging them towards the river. He’d spoken to a few of them, or tried to, but nothing changed – he hadn’t made any difference.

He’d never caught anyone in the act, though, thankfully. He doesn’t know what would have happened if he had. Doesn’t want to think about it.

There is a young woman on the surface of the water right now. Her form is still, arrested mid-impact, her eyes looking up towards the sky with a wordless plea. _Please_ , they seem to say. _I made a mistake_.

 _Please, not yet_.

Oliver Banks turns away. “Is this what you want, then?” he asks the Presence behind him, which has strolledsatglided leisurely along directly in his blind spot as they’ve drifted through London, the distances expanding and contracting at Oliver Banks’s whims. “The fear? I wonder, can you take a statement?”

The Watchful pressure on the back of his neck shifts, like JonnotJon is shaking his head. And then it changes once more – a moment of self-reflective surprise.

“Hm,” Oliver Banks says. “Then what are you here for? The peace and quiet? You’d be better off going to the Lonely for–”

There’s a sudden spike in Attention that is echoed in his own body’s ghostly responses. His not-heart starts beating faster, he can feel not-blood rushing in his ears. It’s odd, though, and distant, like a half-remembered reflex from some long-ago life. Fear. But it isn’t coming from him.

“Ah,” he says. “I see.”

*

He talks more, next time.

“I wonder,” he says as the prickling weight of its Regard settles around his shoulders like a heavy mantle (like a yoke). “How far do your powers extend in my domain? At what point does talking to you become a statement? Do you have to will it? Do I?”

The weight on his back turns soft. JonnotJon doesn’t know.

“Hm.”

They’re in Wapping, for no reason in particular except that the tendrils of death coming in and out of the Thames are always thick here. Oliver Banks follows their twisted route – not any one in particular, but gliding along with the bulk of them. These are old deaths. The tendrils are part of the soil here, now.

“This is not a statement, Watcher. You have enough of me already.”

Acquiescence.

“This is the first place I thought about suicide,” Oliver Banks continues, surprising himself. So maybe they _are_ in Wapping for a reason. He feels the Presence behind him turn attentive, almost friendly, not only Watching but also just watching. Almost human. “Graham and I had started doing some weekend touristing. Getting me out of the house. Getting _him_ out of the house. We walked along the old roads, those old stairways, with the low-tide smell everywhere when you got down close to the water. There used to be a place called Execution Dock, you know. They’d hang pirates when the water was low and let their bodies get submerged by the tide. I thought, wouldn’t it be so easy to hang myself? To let go? To drop, and then… to drift?”

He touches his neck. Maybe back then, there had been a tendril there, the narrowest thing, a little curl of Death around his throat. Maybe someone else had seen it.

“And then Graham told me to stop staring at the water and come get a drink with him. Maybe I felt it, even then. How heavy it is around this place.” He gestures at the tendrils, coiling over and around each other, knotted thickly in the foundations of newer buildings. “Maybe that’s what started it all.”

It feels strange, remembering things that are so distinctly human. Not _wrong_ , but… but like a tingling sort of phantom pain, reaching for something that is no longer part of yourself.

“This wasn’t a statement,” Oliver Banks adds, with some emphasis, just for the sake of it.

A prickle of amusement runs up and down his spine like ants. And then there’s nothing.

*

When he dreams, _really_ dreams – not like the darkened visions of a death-shrouded London – Oliver Banks finds himself in the dark. Not the Dark, with Its palpable presence, but the simple absence of light. He finds himself alone. Not Lonely, with the knowledge of others so near and so far. There is simply no one else. He finds himself amid nothingness. Not the Vast expanse of space, which makes you feel less than small in the face of its significance, but the flat reality that there is simply nothing else. Maybe there never was.

Oliver Banks finds himself in the cold, dead void between stars. The stillness of the vacuum. The patient heat death of the Universe. The eternal, unraveling present as time crawls slowly, painfully, _fearfully_ to a stop.

It is somewhere the Watcher cannot see, cannot even conceive of, because in this dream there is no Watcher. There is nothing but the creeping End, devouring all before it turns on itself.

It is so beautiful and fearful that it makes Oliver Banks want to cry. But tears, too, no longer exist at the End of all things.

These are not dreams he wakes from. They live inside of him, at his core, slowly expanding until what was once Oliver Banks who is now Death will be no more.

But that is a far-off end, at least for now. Death is slow. It takes its time. It has an eternity to wait, after all.

*

In his dreams the London Eye is still and shrouded in that same reddish, darkened glow that hangs over the entire city. He comes up here sometimes for a different view, for a bit of a joke when the Watcher arrives. Let no one say that Death lacks a sense of humor.

He stands on a roof of one of the carriages, watching the city of death spread out beneath him. He has a sudden and distinct vision of Jon, barefoot and wearing a ragged old t-shirt, sitting in one of the seats behind him. He’s kept his hair long.

This is the most concretely Oliver Banks has ever seen him. Or _not_ seen him, as the case may be. He takes a few moments to mull over the implications.

“I think,” he says after a long pause of Observant silence, “that these visits will end soon. You don’t have to argue,” he adds because he feels a little shiver in the constant Attention at the back of his neck. “But here is no fear here. Not, at least, in a form It can consume. And It’s hungry, isn’t it. You’re hungry. Growing into your powers.”

That warning prickle withdraws so suddenly that Oliver Banks thinks for a moment that he has been left alone in his dream. And then it snaps back, as if JonnotJon had forced his gaze away for just a moment before being drawn back like gravity.

“Does it make it better if I say that – in spite of myself – I’ll be sad when you finally go?” Oliver Banks asks, and is surprised to hear a tentative note in his own voice. Where is it coming from, this sudden nervousness, this quiet ache? Like flexing a muscle rarely used.

Feelings are almost a novelty. He tucks that sensation away. He’ll examine it later. Or he won’t.

The weight of the Watcher’s gaze turns into a different kind of pressure, like someone has squeezedpattedtouched his shoulder. It’s only there for a moment, and then it’s gone, and the Watcher is gone as well.

“Be well, Archivist,” says Oliver Banks. “We’ll meet again.”

*

When everything ends and begins again, when the world is remade, the insistent weight of Regard on Oliver Banks’s shoulders feels almost like an old friend.

 _Almost_.

He considers his domain – the process takes both more and less time than he expected, but “time” exists here only as an abstraction – and begins to compose his statement.


End file.
